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Copyright ]^° 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



A Broadway Restaurant after the Theatre 



BROADWAY 




Trinity Church 



BROADWAY 



BY 



y. B. Kerfoot 

DRAWINGS BY 

LESTER G. HORNBY 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

MDCCCCXI 



Flit 



COPYRIGHT, 191 I 
BY J. B. KERFOOT AND LESTER G, HORNBY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October igii 



^ 



C^CI.A2;)7(;7G 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

A Broadway Restaurant after the 

Theatre Half-title 

Trinity Church Frontispiece 

A Hansom, Union Square i 

Broadway from Bowling Green 7 

"HoKi-PoKi Men," Union Square 13 

Entrance to the Old Astor House 19 

Up Broadway from 22d Street 23 

Broadway from Park Row 29 

Lower Broadway from City Hall Park 33 

In the Wholesale District, below Union 

Square 37 

In Madison Square 43 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Grace Church 49 

Broadway at Union Square 53 

A Rainy Evening — Madison Square 57 

The " Flatiron " Building, Broadway, at 

Fifth Avenue 61 

Along by Martin's 65 

Just above Columbus Circle 71 

At Daly's 'j'j 

The "Taxi" Stand at Greeley Square 81 

A Freak Racing Model near "the 2^"] 
Circle" 

Up Broadway from Herald Square 93 

Looking up Broadway from 39TH Street 97 

Broadway at Times Square ioi 

Nursemaids and Children at io6th Street 105 

Times Square — Rector's, Times Building, 

Hotel Astor hi 

\i 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

In front of Hotel Astor i i 5 

Up Broadway from 113TH Street 121 

Broadway at Columbus Circle 127 

The "Peanut Man," ii6th Street 133 

The Subway Station near the Ansonia, 

72D Street 139 

The Ansonia, Broadway and 72D Street 143 

An Oriental Bit — First Baptist Church 

at 79TH Street 147 

The 135TH Street End of the "Dip," 

starting at 120TH Street 151 

At 104TH Street 155 

The Park on Broadway at io6th Street 159 

A Castle between Broadway and the 

Hudson — 1930 Street 163 

A Suggestion of Spain from 109TH Street 167 

Doctor Mulvey's Dog and Cat Hospital 

— A Relic, at Cathedral Parkway 171 

vii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Looking across the Hudson from Broad- 
way AT ii6th Street 175 

Columbia College from Broadway 179 

Off to Albany 181 

A Relic of Old Broadway near 192D 

Street 185 

The "Frankfurter Man" 189 

From drawings by Lester G. Hornby 



A Hansom^ Union Square 



BROADWAY 
I 

I WAS leaning, one afternoon, on the stone 
rail of the promenade-deck affair that sur- 
rounds the fifty-second story of one of the 
downtown office-towers, looking dreamily 
down into the chasm of Broadway — that long 
narrow cleft in the plateau of skyscraper 
roofs that forms the Grand Canon of lower 
Manhattan. And as I watched the sluggish 
stream of life that filled the far bottom of the 
gorge, a man alongside of me volunteered a 
remark. 

" Gee ! " he said, " they look like ants, don't 
they?" 

Now this was, or at least it had every out- 



BROADWAY 
ward appearance of being, an utterly harm- 
less observation. I dare say, indeed, that had 
I noticed him standing there or seen that he 
was approaching the conversational boiling- 
point, I could have predicted it. But I was day- 
dreaming, and so, momentarily, in that con- 
dition of mental flaccidity in which an idea, 
like a microbe, can find lodgment in one's 
psychological system and work unhindered 
havoc there. And no sooner had the word 
*' ants " left my unnoticed neighbor's lips than 
I found myself twelve years and twelve thou- 
sand miles away, sitting on the broad and 
shaded porch of a squat inn in the mountains 
of Java, watching a long thin line of ascend- 
ing and descending insects that stretched from 
the stone floor, diagonally across the stuc- 
coed wall to a crack above a door. The line 
was a dozen feet long and in width perhaps a 

4 



BROADWAY 

quarter of an inch. It was black with ants. 
From dawn to dark there was never a break 
in the toihng procession. And ahhough by 
night ( more than once I had brought my bed- 
room candle out to see) there was nothing 
doing in the ant world and no dimmest mark 
to distinguish their beaten road from the blank 
wall, by day there seemed never a change in 
the uncharted route the procession followed, 
and no stress of numbers, no congestion of 
traffic, ever forced the travelers on that 
crooked and curving highway to take to the 
adjacent fields. It, too, might have been a 
street lined with skyscrapers. 

But the amazing part of the spectacle, the 
fantastic, grotesque, nightmarish aspect of the 
thing, upon which this microbe of an idea fast- 
ened and began to breed, was this : the road 
that these thronging insects traveled was so 

5 



BROADWAY 

narrow that every outgoing ant necessarily 
came within touching distance of every home- 
comer ; and every meeting resulted in a chal- 
lenge. The individuals composing the host 
moved by jerks. Two steps and a challenge 
— three steps and another challenge — one 
step and another challenge. And all chal- 
lengings w'ere conducted under parliament- 
ary rules. Tw'O ants stopped, head on. They 
solemnly rubbed antenna?. They paused to 
consider the results. Then they side-stepped 
wdth a sort of hurried dignity and moved on 
to the next meeting. 

The thing had fascinated me at the time. 
I had spent hours that were meant for siesta 
in watching the show. I had held a watch on 
one returning member of the colony and had 
found that it took him some eleven minutes 
to cover the twelve feet of highway and that 

6 



Broadway from Bowling Green 



BROADWAY 

he held ov^er two hundred interviews on the 
way. I had racked my brain to discover 
whether it was social curiosity, or business 
interests, or military precaution, that impelled 
them to the performance ; whether it was 
gossip, or instructions, or countersigns that 
they exchanged at those palpitating confabs. 
And then I had gone away and forgotten 
it all. 

And now, at a chance word from an un- 
noticed stranger, it all came back to me and 
the old fascination began to breed a new 
fantasy. There, five hundred feet below me, 
stretched that other long thin line that was 
Broadway. From dawn till dark — and after 
— it, too, was lined with ascending and de- 
scending insects. What if, just once, one 
v^ere to make the long journey up that crooked 
and curving highway, challenging every hu- 

9 



BROADWAY 

man ant one met, stopping him, rubbing 
antennae with him, sensing the sources he 
derived from, the ends he aimed at, the in- 
stincts he obeyed, the facts he bhnked, the 
illusions he hugged, — getting, in short, the 
essence of his errand ? Suppose one covered 
the dozen miles in eleven days and held two 
hundred thousand interviews by the way ? 
Suppose, when one reached the heights of 
Harlem, one sat down and took stock of what 
one had learned ? Suppose — I was, I think, 
a trifle drunk from the fumes of the imagined 
adventure. I forgot the man who had spoken 
to me. I entered the elevator, exploiting the 
vision, and reached the sidewalk still wrapped 
in dreams. The human ants were out in force. 
A score of them were bearing down on me. 
I laid my hand on the arm of the first of 
them. 

10 



BROADWAY 

"Sir," I said, "are you a native of this 
ant-hill?" 

I never pursued the adventure in its origin- 
ally projected form. But ever since that after- 
noon's awakening, when I 've walked Broad- 
way, it has been with antennae extended. 



'''• Hoki-Poki Men" Union Square 



II 




II 

THERE is nothing in the world so uni- 
versal, so potent, so impossible to disre- 
gard, and so difficult to define as personality. 
The dictionary — that brazenly impudent 
beggar of pertinent questions — assures us 
that it is *'the attributes, taken collectively, 
that make up the character and nature of an 
individual." But, as usual, we know better 
than the dictionary ; although, also as usual, we 
should get into hopeless difficulties if we tried 
to prove it. For the dictionary is a kind of 
cuttlefish, which, when closely pressed, emits 
an inky cloud of impenetrable verbiage, under 
cover of which it complacently returns to its 
original position. However, we must not be 
too hard on the poor dictionary ; for it not only 

15 



BROADWAY 

carries on an enormous business on a hope- 
lessly inadequate capital, but having assumed 
the frightful responsibility of being omni- 
scient it cannot afford to take chances. 

But personality is not a sum in arithmetic. 
It is something much more closely resembling 
a phenomenon in physics. 

If we are introduced to a man on the street- 
corner, the first thing that we are aware of in 
regard to him is what, for want of a better 
expression, we may call the impact of his per- 
sonality. And though we may never see him 
again, and may forget his face and his name 
and the circumstances of the encounter, it is 
quite possible that the inarticulable impression 
of that mysterious emanation may be recover- 
able in our consciousness for years. He may 
have been a horse-thief and a wife-beater, a 
liar, a bunco-man, and an oppressor of the 

16 



BROADWAY 

fatherless. Yet either the sum total of these 
things must be able, on occasion, to coalesce 
into an attractive and projectable essence, or 
else the personality that we recall with pleas- 
ure was something independent of their 
synthesis. 

Moreover, personality is not confined to 
what, in ordinary weekday English, we are 
used to calling "individuals." Animals possess 
it. Trees, in a green, vegetable way, are en- 
dowed with it. Mountains have it. Certainly 
no wanderer among the cities will dream of 
denying their possession of the gift ; and he is 
but an insensitive plodder along the sidewalks 
of life who is not conscious that one street 
differs from another street in personality as 
one star differs from another star in glory. 

But personalities — especially those of 
streets — are kittle-cattle. They are at once 

17 



BROADWAY 

saucy and elusive. They elbow us at cross- 
ings. They grin up at us from the cobbles. 
They laugh down at us from the sky-signs. 
They beckon us from the thick of the traffic, 
and pretend to take shelter in the shadows 
of doorways. They sometimes twiddle tan- 
talizing thumbs at us from the eyes of urchins 
and again appear to perch perkily upon the 
shoulders of policemen. But when we have 
painstakingly beaten the bush of all these 
coverts, they are not there. 

They are, in sober truth, abstractions ; and 
after the manner of their kind, they presume 
upon their advantages. One would need the 
brazen self-confidence of the dictionary itself 
to think that one could walk boldly up to one 
of these radiant intangibilities, throw a cun- 
ning noose of words over its head, lead it 
triumphantly home, and exhibit it as a trophy 

18 



Entrance to the Old Astor House 



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BROADWAY 

of the chase. And yet in all the realm of 
sport there is no more alluring game than 
hunting them. 

Only (and as we are going hunting to- 
gether the point cannot be too carefully em- 
phasized) the necessary tactics are a trifle 
odd. One can neither stalk a personality nor 
(a method sometimes only too successful 
with lions) induce one to stalk us. Stealth 
is wasted and strategy is of no avail. Much 
less is it possible by sustained pursuit to bring 
such a quarry to bay. It is only by being 
both careless and careful; by always going 
loaded, yet never carrying a gun ; by often 
seeming mad as any hatter, yet always hiding 
a bit of method in our noddles ; by loitering 
purposively in unlikely places in a mood 
happy-go-luckily compounded of opportun- 
ism and haphazardness ; by never, even for a 

21 



BROADWAY 

moment, forgetting what we are after and 
seldom, even to ourselves, acknowledging 
what we are doing, that we can hope — but 
let us get on the ground. 



up Broadiuay from 22d Street 



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SOMEWHERE along back in fifteen hundred 
and fifty odd, a globe-trotting burgher 
from that watertight compartment in the 
North Sea which is known as Holland brought 
some tulip seeds home with him from Con- 
stantinople, and thereby earned the right, 
although his name has been forgotten and no 
tablet to his memory will ever be erected by 
any American society of Holland dames, to 
figure as the authentic forefather of Broad- 
way. 

For those few tulip seeds (one imagines 
them sharing the capacious pockets of his 
square-tailed coat with a Turkish phrase- 
book and a flask of hollands) in due time be- 
came tulips. And these, having gladdened 

25 



BROADWAY 
the eyes of our traveler's fellow countrymen, 
bred other tulips. And these not only bred 
others still, but went intoxicatingly to the 
heads of a people whom no amount of 
schnapps had ever thus affected. So that soon 
there was no square-tailed coat in all the Low 
Countries so poor that its pockets held no 
seeds. And before long about half of the 
bottom of that watertight compartment was 
sown to tulips. And the exchanges took to 
listing new varieties of that watered stock. 
And men speculated on margin in October 
bulbs and sold March tulips short. And 
finally, what with tending red and yellow 
tulips by day and dreaming of blue ones by 
night, the very noses of the nation took on 
a flowery hue, and throughout Europe a 
Dutchman was recognizable by his bulbous 
build. 

26 



BROADWAY 

And thus it came about that when, in 1 626, 
the Dutch East India Company sent Peter 
Minuit out to estabhsh the trading-post of 
New Amsterdam, it was less of set purpose 
than by a sort of racial instinct that, just be- 
hind the rear gate of his little fort, he planted 
the unconsidered bulb of Bowling Green from 
w^hich has sprung the amazing stalk, Broad- 
way. 

Good old Peter ! He wore, one likes to 
think, a leathern belt some cubits in circum- 
ference, with several snickersnees stuck in 
it; and beneath the brim of his imposing hat 
there dwelt a pair of eyes that knew a bar- 
gain when they saw one. But when (doubt- 
less protesting that the natives were bank- 
rupting him by their rapacity ) he paid over 
his sixty guilders worth of jimcracks and took 
the title-deeds to Manhattan Island, he little 

27 



BROADWAY 

suspected the fertility of that rocky soil or 
guessed what a Jack-and-the-beanstalky plant 
was destined to take root in his back yard. 
And while the plant has grown beyond cal- 
culation, and bears flowers and fruit that the 
wisest Burbank in all Amsterdam would 
never have dared prophesy, we have only to 
look down from the windows of any of the 
modern skyscrapers that hem it in, to see that 
there, at the base of all the fevered activity 
and plodding hopelessness and gay unconcern 
of its long, twisted, and knotted stem, that 
little bulb still quiescently reposes in simple 
symmetry and vegetating calm. 

It is, I think, the quietest spot in all New 
York, and the most restful — once you have 
gotten into its good graces. But it is not — 
like some of the wistfully reminiscent, shabby- 
genteel, manifestly come-down-in-the-world 

28 



Broadway from Park Row 









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BROADWAY 

little squares that are to be met with here 
and there in the city — easy to get acquainted 
with. 

Some of these fairly beg you to come and 
sit with them. And when, from sheer pity or 
out of passing curiosity, you linger for a 
moment on their warped benches or lean 
against their rusty fences, they whisper to you 
that it seems like old times to see an American 
face again, and that as for gloves and a walk- 
ing-stick, — why, dear, dear, they remember, 
years ago, — and they confidentially point 
out doorways whose colonial fan-lights now 
hang askew and whose slender pilastered 
frames are smirched and broken ; and they 
croon in the ear of your imagination about 
chignons and cashmere shawls and black 
stocks and crinolines and the vanished world 
that once — before Ireland began to empty or 

31 



BROADWAY 

Italy to unite and when Lithuania was but a 
name — came and went and lingered deco- 
rously of balmy evenings along the path where 
that little Dago girl with the bright eyes and 
the dirty face is now minding the baby. 

But it is not thus with Bowling Green. 
Shabby it may be and somewhat out at el- 
bows ; but neither wistfulness nor an appeal 
for sympathy are to be detected in its bearing. 
If there are any advances to be made, they '11 
come from you. And be very sure that it has 
its own way of dealing with people that carry 
guidebooks and stare open-mouthed at its one 
rakish sycamore tree and its Ashless fishpool 
and ask suspicious questions of it with an air 
of being antiquarians. It answers them not at 
all. Or, worse still, it grumbles noisy insults 
at them in its deep subway voice and clangs 
its circling cable-gongs in their ears, and bids 

32 



Lower Broadway from City Hall Park 













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BROADWAY 

them read the grandiloquent inscription on 
the base of its De Peyster statue and begone 
about their business. Some day, if you feel in 
a sardonic mood, go down and watch the ex- 
pressions on their baffled faces. 

But if you are one of those to whom this 
httle parklet's immersion in turmoil only 
serves, in certain moods, to enhance its aloof- 
ness, then to you, when it has come to know 
you, it will offer an isle of refuge, a place of 
withdrawal and of self-communing, a sort of 
sanctuary of silence in a war of sound. For 
you, too, bit by grudging bit, it will consent 
to reveal its secrets. And for those whom it 
thus favors it keeps a special bench (it stands 
just behind the news-stand by the subway en- 
trance), from which, without losing sight of 
the bit of magic sky reflected in the fountain 
basin, they can just manage to look around 

35 



BROADWAY 
the corner of the hill into the defile of Broad- 
way. And sometimes, as they look, they will 
find the clamor of the surrounding streets 
withdraw itself from hearing and become but 
the rumble of the present echoing back into 
the silence of its source. And then, by a mere 
half-turn of the mind's eye, they will find 
the past close beside them. 

Let us sit there for a moment. For even on 
Broadway the past has some significance. 

We are apt, when we think at all of the early 
Dutch village of New Amsterdam, to think of 
it as sitting squatly and peak-roofedly on the 
tip of the island, with its back to the bay and its 
whitewashed face turned expectantly toward 
the future city. But of course, as a matter of 
fact, it did nothing of the sort. It faced the 
shore and gave only so much heed to the 
hinterland of swamp and hill behind it as to 

36 



In the Wholesale District^ below Union Square 









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BROADWAY 

bethink it of building a palisade at its back, in 
order that it might sleep undisturbed by fear 
of raids organized in the woods that are Wall 
Street. For even in 1626 the idea of selling 
a property to outsiders and then freezing out 
the new management, having a receiver ap- 
pointed and effecting a reorganization, was not 
unknown in these latitudes. 

Outside this first palisade and at the foot of 
the hill that still slopes up from Bowling 
Green lay an open space that was called *'The 
Plain." I have called it Peter Minuit's back 
yard. It could not, however, even aspire to 
that reflected dignity; for it was the place 
where, had the early seventeenth century 
afforded such commodities, the empty cans 
and discarded woven- wire mattresses of the 
community would have been bestowed ; and 
it was not until the little town, spreading 

39 



BROADWAY 
back from the harbor at the foot of Broad 
Street, had scattered a few shanties along the 
eastern side of this Common, and the new 
fort of 1635 had given a touch of fashion to 
its southern edge, that the most imaginative 
optimist in the garrison began to see any 
possibihties in it. Then — first indication of the 
boom to be — a grant was made to Burgo- 
master Martin Cregier of "land for a house 
and garden lying north of the fort." But even 
so, Martin waited seventeen years before he 
built. And then — "The Plain" having in 
the mean time become "The Market Field," 
and Martin having doubtless interviewed the 
plain clothes representative of the Man across 
the Way — the Burgomaster built, not a 
"house and garden," but a tavern. 

Perhaps the Governor, playing bowls on 
his newly graded lawn behind the new fort, 

40 



BROADWAY 

took to dropping in on Martin between games. 
Presumably the court followed his example. 
At any rate, the Burgomaster soon came to 
be recognized as the Delmonico of his day; 
and it was not long before, if you had asked 
him, he would have told you that his tavern 
stood at the beginning of De Heere Straat — 
the Great Highway. 
The bulb had sprouted. 



In Madison Square 



IV 




IV 

THERE is always a certain temptation to 
the biographer to multiply anecdotes of 
his hero's childhood. 

It would be pleasant to sit at ease in Bowling 
Green and recall the divine naivete of an in- 
fantile Broadway that could still pride itself, 
as late as 1737, upon its business sagacity in 
getting four hundred and seventy-five dollars 
for the corner of Exchange Place. 

It would be interesting to note and to spec- 
ulate upon the tavernly tenacity of Meinherr 
Cregier's freehold, whereon the King's Arms 
succeeded the original establishment ; which 
in its turn became Burns's Coffee House; 
which same, after seeing many sights and 
passing under many aliases, was still in evi- 
dence as the Atlantic Garden as late as i860. 

45 



BROADWAY 

It would be entertaining to disentangle the 
threads of the Aneke Jans affair, and see how 
a worthy dame of early New Amsterdam, by 
marrying two husbands and a riverside plan- 
tation, became, if there is any truth in affi- 
davits, the ancestress of about ten per cent of 
the population of America; bequeathed to her 
descendants, share and share alike, in fee- 
simple and in perpetuity, an undivided interest 
in an imaginary claim against Trinity Parish ; 
and thus not only put hope into thousands of 
the hopeless, even to this day, but furnished 
lucrative employment for the lawyers of ten 
generations. 

We might even manage ( a thing to which 
the best of us are not averse) to discover one 
of those quietly ironic jokes that Fate seems 
to be so fond of perpetrating, apparently for 
her own exclusive enjoyment. Do you see 

46 



BROADWAY 

that towering pile of steel and stone at 26 
Broadway ? It is the home of the Standard 
Oil. It is the centre of the web. It is the point 
of vantage upon which, for so many years, a 
gaunt old spider of finance stood, benignly 
somnolent, yet always ready (after the im- 
memorial manner of spiders) so violently to 
shake his taut fabric of silky threads that no 
attorney-general of them all could either 
make out the design of their construction or 
put his finger on the spider. Yet once, mod- 
estly displayed on the lower right-hand corner 
of a visiting-card, the number 26 Broadway 
revealed the place where Alexander Hamilton 
lay awake at night excogitating the fiscal 
policy of a new Republic, and never seeing, 
for all his sagacity, a warning in the symbolic 
fact that the oil in his midnight lamp was fur- 
nished by a whale. 

47 



BROADWAY 

But our business with the past is not of this 
gossipy and hobnobbish nature. We are come 
to interview it, not to visit it. We have called 
it up, not to listen to its reminiscences, but to 
ask it a question. 

Broadway, even to an unfamiliar and casual 
visitor, is amazingly abrupt and apparently 
arbitrary in its transitions. It never seems to 
alter by degrees, but always to change by 
jerks. One section of it never seems to melt 
into another section, but always to flounce 
into it. Those of us, too, who have known it 
long realize that though it sometimes alters, 
almost overnight, the whole character and 
contents of one of these divisions, it is un- 
alterably persistent in retaining its lines of 
transitional demarcation. We are come to 
ask the past to tell us why. 

Again Broadway, even to the senses of the 
48 



Grace Church 



BROADWAY 
same unfamiliar and casual visitor, differs from 
the other streets and avenues of New York in 
something beside its greater length, its more 
varied life, and the larger number of its tall 
buildings and electric lights. It differs, too, 
quite as manifestly from the chief thorough- 
fares of all other American cities, and the dif- 
ference is equally unstateable in terms of 
statistics. We are come to the past to ask if 
it can give us any clue to the nature of this 
difference. Let us see what it has to say. 

In Martin Cregier's day De Heere Straat 
ran to the new palisade that the growing town 
had built in 1653 on the line of Wall Street. 
Beyond the gates and as far as what is now 
Park Row it was also a traveled road and 
was known as De Heere Wegh. But there, 
instead of showing any sign of pushing on into 
the country on the line of its future course, 

51 



BROADWAY 

it ended abruptly at the new Common (or 
"The Fields," as the some-day-to-be City 
Hall Park was at first called ) , and turned its 
scanty traffic over to the Bowery Lane. It had 
come up like a weed, no man foreseeing it. It 
grew like a weed, no man tending it. And to 
all contemporary appearances it stopped like 
a weed when it had got its growth. 

New Amsterdam became New York. New 
York, for a few months, changed hands and 
name again and became New Orange. Once 
more, and this time for good, the city took 
its present name. And still no one seemed 
to dream but that the stretch of highway that 
had come to be called Broadway was com- 
plete as it stood. Indeed, so firmly was this 
notion fixed in the public mind that when, in 
1760, the city fathers laid out what is now 
Broadway between Vesey and Duane Streets, 
• 52 



Broadway at Union Square 




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"\ . . IT'S 







BROADWAY 
the extension was not even recognized for 
what it was, but was called Great George 
Street. And it was only when the Revolution 
was over and house-cleaning patriots were 
busy changing *' Crown " Street to *' Liberty " 
and "King" Street to "Pine," that it oc- 
curred to some one that " Great George " 
Street — objectionable name — might be got- 
ten rid of by calling it Broadway. 

But even this does not seem to have dis- 
turbed in the least the public's conviction that 
Broadway was not a growing organism, but 
a given quantity. Great George Street, dur- 
ing the thirty years following its christening, 
had, with some pauses for breath, labori- 
ously climbed the hill, to the north of which, 
and on the present line of Canal Street, a 
little stream crossed from the Collect Pond 
to the Lispenard Meadows and the Hudson 

55 



BROADWAY 
River. During the Revolution the British had 
built a stone bridge across this creek to con- 
nect the fortifications they had thrown up on 
the hills at both sides of it. And now, taking 
quick advantage of this convenience, Broad- 
way was soon stretching out toward a sandy 
lane that ran from the little settlement at the 
head of the Bowery to Greenwich Village — 
the present Astor Place. But did anybody 
recognize it ? Not a soul. It was known, even 
officially, as '' The Middle Road." And it 
was not till the beginning of the nineteenth 
century that it seems to have been generally 
realized that the street which ended against 
the fence of the Sailors' Snug Harbor grounds 
was Broadway, now finally after many years 
arrived at its full growth. The weed had 
stolen another march on the gardeners. 
But now a somewhat noteworthy event 
56 



A Rainy Evening — Madison Square 



BROADWAY 
occurred. People had for some time been talk- 
ing of the advisability of mapping out the 
whole upper part of Manhattan Island, so that, 
as the city grew northward, there would be a 
predetermined and symmetrical plan for de- 
velopment to follow. In 1807 a commission 
was appointed to give this idea effect, and 
in 1820 they submitted a plan, which was 
approved and which has been pretty closely 
adhered to. But first a bit of preliminary 
clearing-up was undertaken. The gardeners 
became suspicious of the weed and determined 
to cut off its head. 

The oldest, and indeed for long years the 
only, thoroughfare leading from early New 
York to the outer world was the Bowery- 
Bloomingdale-Eastern Post Road. It was to 
this highway that the traffic of De Heere 
Wegh had been diverted when the latter 

59 



BROADWAY 
stopped at "The Fields." It was to this high- 
way that the traffic of "The Middle Road " 
was turned over through the lane at Astor 
Place. It was into this ancient and honorable 
highway that it was now proposed to lead 
Broadway and so get rid of it forever. A way 
was opened for it through the property of 
the Sailors' Snug Harbor Foundation. A twist 
was given it at what is now the intersection 
of Tenth Street, and it was headed for the 
Bloomingdale Road at about Sixteenth Street 
and the matter dismissed as settled. 

But, as we have had occasion to see in our 
own day, Broadway is a plant that refuses to 
be topped. New York awoke one morning 
along in the thirties and discovered that the 
Bloomingdale Road had disappeared and that 
Broadway bloomed in its stead. And with the 
complacent acceptance of the accomplished, 

60 



The '^'-Flatiron " Buildings Broadway^ at Fifth Avenue 









t\ ^V : 



&VV' ' 



BROADWAY 
and the refusal to learn from past misjudg- 
ments, that have always characterized New- 
York's attitude toward this most self-willed 
of its creatures, it was immediately seen that 
Broadway naturally and inevitably ran to 
Fifty-ninth Street and also that it naturally 
and finally ended there. 

The matter touches our own times. It is 
only a year or so ago that we saw Eighth 
Avenue run into Columbus Circle from the 
south and run out of it toward the north ; 
saw Fifty-ninth Street run into it from the 
east and out of it toward the west ; saw Broad- 
way run into it cat-a-corner and the Bou- 
levard run out of it askew; — and drew no 
inferences. Yet how self-evident the truth 
became when the signs were changed on the 
lamp-posts ! And if to-day you will examine 
a map of the Greater City you will see where 

63 



BROADWAY 

Broadway, the last vestige of its Fabian pol- 
icy thrown aside, has literally knocked St. 
Nicholas Avenue to one side, stolen its right 
of way, gobbled the poor old King's Bridge 
Road (which the house-cleaning patriots of 
'94 forgot to rechristen), and thus for the 
first time under its own name has made its 
way into the open. They say it ends at 
Albany. 

And now that we have run our fingers 
down the index of histor}^ let us see if we 
can find an answer to our questions. 

For one thing, it is fairly evident why, 
even to-day, De Heere Straat is dimly diflfer- 
entiable from De Heere Wegh. Also why 
Great George Street has something more 
than its habit of dealing in typewriters and 
sporting-goods to mark it off from those sec- 
tions of the lower street that had a hundred 

64 



Jlong by Martin's 



fT^KSfWW! 



K! 



*5^ 1 



'i'' 




t,fc 



Vfr^V; 



BROADWAY 

years the start of it. Also that the sudden 
sense of having reached the New Jerusalem, 
which one is conscious of when one walks 
north across Canal Street, may owe its sud- 
denness less to the sharply drawn clannish- 
ness of race than to the persisting tradition 
that the Middle Road was an independent 
entity. And it is perhaps little to be won- 
dered at that this habit of developing by sec- 
tions has been maintained when we see how 
conveniently the stretches from Astor Place 
to Union Square, from Seventeenth Street 
to Twenty-third, from Twenty-third Street to 
Thirty-fourth, from Thirty-fourth Street to 
Forty-second, and from Forty-second Street 
to the Circle have lent themselves to its con- 
tinuance. 

As for the other question, if history does 
not answer it categorically, it at least hints 

67 



BROADWAY 
at its solution. We were *'warm," as the 
children say, when we likened Broadway to 
a weed in a garden ; for it is evidently in spite 
of the gardeners and not through their care 
that Broadway has grown up and come into 
its own. Fifth Avenue was planted. Broad- 
way <'just growed." But we should be 
warmer yet, I fancy, if we likened the dif- 
ference between Broadway and other thor- 
oughfares to that difference — not at all one of 
degree and yet not flatfootedly one of kind — 
that subsists between the domesticated duck 
and the canvasback ; or, better still, to that be- 
tween the pedigreed cat on the hearth and its 
striped relative in the jungle. Pennsylvania 
Avenue and Halsted Street are by Geometry 
out of Foresight. Broadway is fei'ce naturae. 
That is why, from no matter what cross- 
street you emerge on no matter what part of 

68 



BROADWAY 

its course, some dim ancestral instinct in you 
stirs as though it recognized its enemy or its 
prey. If you come of the timid tribes, — if 
your totem is the hare or the horse, — you 
tremble imperceptibly, like your prototypes 
at the track of a bear. If you come of tougher 
breed, — if the boar hound is the sign of your 
house, — the hackles of your mind make 
ready to bristle. 

It is the taint of the untamed. 



yust above Columbus Circle 









p /,. 



II' i» » * 







V 

IN the last analysis I suppose that we are 
all either statisticians or impressionists. 

Half of us, when face to face with a pheno- 
menon, ask that the counting-machines of our 
minds be furnished with items to add. The 
rest of us seek a symbol to prime the pumps 
of our imaginations. 

Personally, I am free to confess that the 
most incalculable orgies of calculation are use- 
less for the purpose of arriving at an answ^er 
to the lower reaches of Broadway. The aver- 
age of millionaires to the acre ; the price 
of land per square foot ; the number of 
stories in the latest tower; the population of 
the largest office building ; the distance that 
the steel girders of the district would stretch, 

73 



BROADWAY 

end to end, toward the moon ; — are all equally 
amazing and equally meaningless to me. Like 
Alice, who could n't tell the Red Queen how 
much one and one and one and one and one 
made, I cannot do addition. I cannot even do 
differential calculus. I think that I must be 
an impressionist. 

At any rate, it was by accident that I first 
stumbled upon one of the guarded secrets of 
Lower Broadway — a place that I had long 
accepted as merely the central passage of the 
financial hive, banked on both sides by serried 
ranks of cells where golden honey was stored, 
and busy workers, to the humming of a 
million telephones and the buzzing of ten 
thousand tickers, fed baby Trusts on yellow 
pollen. 

Like other would-be wise men who like 
to tickle their own fancies by playing hide- 

74 



BROADWAY 

and-seek with ironies, and think to catch that 
shy bird that we call the Trend of the Times 
by putting a pinch of salt on its tail, I had 
more than once ( remembering that from the 
forgotten epochs at the back of beyond men 
have always expressed their aspirations by the 
spires that they built) nodded my head sagely 
on seeing from the Jersey shore or from the 
decks of ferries, how rapidly the modest 
steeples of an earlier ideal were disappearing 
behind the tower of the Sewing Machine, the 
white pharos of Life Insurance, the battle- 
ments of **City Investments " and of "Syn- 
dicate." I had even thought to have caught 
Fate once more at her practical joking at that 
spot, halfway between Bowling Green and 
the City Hall, where from the bottom of a 
square opening some hundreds of feet in 
depth Old Trinity ( like Truth from the bot- 

75 



BROADWAY 

torn of her well) points an ineffectual finger 
at a forgotten heaven. And when I made pil- 
grimage ( as who that loves beauty and hopes 
to die does not) to her little city of the dead, 
I sometimes remembered that once a year, 
when darkness lends her a false horizon, and 
silence and a glint of snow among the graves 
conspire to hide the existence of the actual, a 
few men with memories and many more with 
tin horns gather to hear her chimes (that were 
cast to ring out the keynote of eternity) play 
guard-mount for the years. For the rest, 
they tell time for Wall Street. 

But one day I happened to miss an early 
train at a downtown ferry, and so, by way 
of killing time, wandered at eight o'clock on 
a Sunday morning up the river to the crest 
of the Island and found, to my absurd sur- 
prise, that Broadway was tenantless. 

76 



At Daly's 



BROADWAY 

I once blundered into the abandoned bed 
of a Western river ; a deep, dim gorge which, 
in the long ago, it had washed and swirled 
and sucked and scoured among the sandstone 
hills and subsequently deserted for a shorter 
course through rougher country. Green 
things filled the bottom of it and high, water- 
worn walls shut it in. It was weirdly quiet 
and uncannily remote. And if one peered be- 
hind the bushes that grew against its sides, 
one came upon hollow-sounding caves that 
Leviathan might have nested in, and saw 
small moss-grown cubbies ranged in rows 
from which mere minnows might once in 
safety have made faces at their enemies. 

Broadway was like that. 

One noticed that there were trees in Trin- 
ity Churchyard. One heard tugs puffing in 
the harbor. At the cavernous door of one of 

79 



BROADWAY 
the great office buildings a shirt-sleeved jan- 
itor sat tilted back in a wooden chair. On the 
corner of Wall Street two policemen stood 
gossiping at the junction of their beats. A 
quartet of Italian girls with baskets on their 
arms hurried chattering toward the Battery 
wharfs on some picnic quest. And down the 
utterly deserted roadway from the north a sin- 
gle motor-cyclist came whirling unrebuked 
at forty miles an hour. The rest was sun- 
shine and silence. 

But, strange to say, the place had no air of 
a deserted city. It did not seem — as Fifth 
Avenue seems late at night, or as the Strand 
seems in the short hour of abandonment that 
comes to it before the dawn — a thing useless 
because unused, or lifeless because swept 
clean of human life. Deserted, it took on se- 
renity. Unused, it developed meanings above 

80 



The " Taxi " Stand at Greeley Square 



■f 




BROADWAY 

its uses. It was not, as I would have sup- 
posed, an empty mart. It was become a 
temple from which the money changers had 
been driven out. 

And later, as I crossed the Hudson and 
looked back at the fairy city that upreared 
itself against the morning, I quietly dropped 
overboard my cynic's similes and satiric sym- 
bols of interpretation. 

I forget how many wonders of the world 
have been added to the classic seven. But I 
am certain that Lower Broadway has become 
the latest member of this Cyclopean family. 
From a feverishly busy street, whose inclos- 
ing rows of cast-iron and brown-stone facades 
fully served and adequately ex pressed the life 
that filled it, it has, before the uncompre- 
hending eyes of a single generation and 
through the ragged stages of a Brobdingnagian 

83 



BROADWAY 
growth, evolved into something at once inde- 
pendent of the men that made it and infinitely 
greater than the sum of all its parts. A few 
decades since, it was a congested thorough- 
fare in a large city. A few years ago, it was 
an uncoordinated congery of architectural 
high tumbling. To-day, a hundred-turreted 
whole, it towers to heaven in indissoluble 
solidarity. 

Only the intensely passionate, basically 
vital, self-unconscious aspirations of man- 
kind have thus uniquely phrased themselves in 
stone. The Egyptian passion for permanency 
was the architect of the Pyramids. The Greek 
passion for perfection built the Parthenon. 
The fiery faith of the Middle Ages flamed 
into the Gothic cathedrals. The as yet un- 
self-cognizant passion of twentieth-century 
America has reared the skyline of Lower 

84 



BROADWAY 
Broadway. It is not a by-product of our 
modernity. It is the self- forecasting monu- 
ment of what we mean to be. 



A Freak Racing Model near " the Circle' 



VI 






VI 

ONE of the problems involved in always 
putting one's best foot forward is the 
difficulty of keeping one's worst foot always 
behind without involving the penalty of stand- 
ing still. 

Sleight-of-hand gentlemen, magicians, and 
wizards of sorts break this seeming dead- 
lock by the simple trick of distracting the 
minds and deflecting the attention of their 
audience during the crucial moment required 
for the protruding of the cloven hoof ; and 
Broadway, which we have seen to be no bun- 
gling amateur in prestidigitation, has worked 
out its own bit of by-play for covering its 
escape from this dilemma. 

Our mothers, in their youth (your grand- 
89 



BROADWAY 

mothers, my dears, if you happen to be well 
under thirty) , did their shopping at Broadway 
and Chambers Street or in the fashion-haunted 
region round Canal. They found it an easy 
walk from their homes in Worth and Broome 
Streets, or, if they came of conservative stock 
and looked disdainfully upon that earlier 
Upper West Side, from their family mansions 
in Maiden Lane and John Street. But to-day, 
if you should do so strange and unlikely a 
thing as to walk resolutely north from where 
the City (as they would say in London) ends, 
— that is to say, from where St. Paul's Chapel 
turns its back upon the National Park Bank 
and has been forgotten for its pains, and 
where the Astor House, like a dejected old 
man, sits with its gray head sunk between its 
shabby shoulders and with a stubbly growth 
of tawdry shops beneath its chin, — you would 

90 



BROADWAY 
scarcely have passed the sunken garden of 
the City Hall, where Justice, after holding her 
scales out in the face of Newspaper Row for a 
generation, recently fell over exhausted, before 
you 'd find yourself in an unknown region. 

This is sometimes spoken of (there are al- 
ways people who think to solve the riddle of 
the universe by mentioning the Nebular Hy- 
pothesis) as the Wholesale District. And it 
in so far justifies this appellation in the eyes 
of the uninitiated who wander into it that the 
show-rooms along its sidewalks seem full of 
things for sale by the gross that no conceiv- 
able human would ever think of buying by 
the piece, — the wire ghosts of misbegotten 
hats ; unlikely looking undergarments ; bolts 
of anaemic fabrics with hectic flushes on their 
unhealthy cheeks; gardensof desperately ar- 
tificial flowers ; exotic feathers from birds that 

91 



BROADWAY 

never flew on land or sea ; strange cliques and 
sordid gatherings of tinsel trimmings, poison- 
ous passementerie, impossible insertion and 
lank laces. And if you raise your eyes, signs are 
not wanting to suggest that the ten lost tribes 
of Israel have at last emerged from hiding. 

From the south, men in search of card- 
index systems, typewriters, burglar-proof 
safes, firearms, and railroad transportation 
occasionally penetrate this region as far as 
Canal Street. From the north, women in 
search of bargains sometimes venture in as 
far as Astor Place. The intervening mile is 
teira incognita. 

How does it come that, beyond a dim,first- 
class-in-history sort of notion that Niblo's 
Garden once stood on the corner of Prince 
Street, and that some one, we forget who, has 
told us that bridge prizes — or was it boys' 

92 



Up Broadway from Herald Square 











^l*!^ ^t." '' '7l^?^'- ' ■"'^^'-. 









BROADWAY 

socks — were to be had for next to nothing at 
Charles Broadway Rouss's, and that both of 
these places were located somewhere in the 
hiatus between up town and down, we have 
but an instinctive, time-and-space conception 
of this district? It is owing to the fact that 
Broadway the Conjuror (in order to keep us 
from noticing that immediately behind that 
magnificently shod <'best foot" that it puts 
so bravely forward trails a ** worse foot," w^/ 
chausse to the point of dilapidated uppers and 
protruding toes) has so arranged matters that 
between the City Hall and Fourteenth Street 
is where all New Yorkers who travel by the 
surface cars read the morning papers on their 
way downtown and the evening papers on 
their way back. 

It was an old Hebrew patriarch who, by 
offering me a simple lesson in geography, first 

95 



BROADWAY 
furnished me with a clue to the understand- 
ing of this motley middle region where Broad- 
way, in its salad days, had been the Middle 
Road. I spied him from a car window — a fine 
old figure in a coat once black, but now gone 
green, with white beard and hair, and the 
far- focused, infinitely patient, yet remorse- 
less eyes, that one always thinks of as be- 
longing in the Sanhedrin, but only sees, now- 
adays, in the heads of occasional sellers of 
shoestrings or suspenders on the crowded 
sidewalks or among the teeming barrows of 
New York's East Side. And because, with no 
appearance of being on alien territory, he was 
walking down Broadway wheeling a baby- 
carriage filled with rolls of old matting and 
the rusted and broken remnants of a cook- 
stove, I jumped out and followed him. 

He was a model for an old master; a study 

96 



Looking up Broadway from J^th Street 






im 



b\ 



■^! l-#= 




W*%!Vl,A4^-* 



BROADWAY 

for the stage ; a sight, one would have said, to 
stop the traffic. Yet none turned to look at 
him, and for blocks not so much as a cocked 
eyebrow or a crooked smile greeted his pa- 
tient progress. 

It has always been a matter for wonder to 
me that so few dwellers in modern Manhattan 
avail themselves of the privilege afforded them 
of making a tour of the world for ten cents. 
Any train on the Second Avenue Elevated 
will put you down at Rivington Street, in the 
heart of Russian Poland ; there are no octroi 
stations on the frontier of Hungary, a few 
blocks north; and a short walk on Hester 
Street will bring you to the streets of Naples, 
from which it is equally easy to go east to 
China or south by west to Syria. But while I 
had thought that I knew my East Side like a 
book, as the phrase goes (shall we ever, I 

99 



BROADWAY 
wonder, have a book as starkly human as the 
East Side ?), I had unconsciously come to look 
upon it as a remote region, self-contained, 
bounded by the Bowery, and separated from 
the purlieus of Broadway by I knew not what 
buffer states of dignified commerce. And 
when my old patriarch, turning east on 
Prince Street, unexpectedly led me by a few 
short byways to a familiar junk-shop in Rus- 
sian Jewry, I realized that not only had the 
world once again proved smaller than I 
thought it, but that in the heat of shrinking it 
had given off an explanation. 

The amazing motley of Broadway from 
Canal Street north was, after all, nothing in it- 
self. It was just the East Side showing through. 
It was simply the chemical discoloration of its 
retaining walls by the fermenting medley of 
mixed races that seethed and boiled behind 

100 



Broadway at Times Square 



ii- 






r"^&-^ 









1 s^v<,|,fj:f ; •- 







i,iauiuu."»"-ri'~>_| f 









^^' 



BROADWAY 
them. And as I made my way back to it, I 
was busy picturing this strange street to my- 
self as continuously throughout its length 
nothing in itself, but simply a sluiceway whose 
retaining walls were a succession of such seep- 
ings and discolorations. And as the picture 
grew and was filled in, as I realized that no- 
where from the Battery to the Bronx, neither 
in the financial centre, nor in the wholesale 
district, nor in the jobbing regions, nor in the 
shopping quarter, nor in the theatre circle, 
nor in any of the successive hotbeds of great 
hotels, were the activities of the city mainly 
housed upon its sidewalks, I began to glimpse 
another of the elusive secrets of Broadway. I 
knew at last how it came about that to those 
who know it, Broadway is always seeming to 
liold the semblance of all things, yet ever 
proving to hold the substance of none; how, 

103 



BROADWAY 

being everything by inference, it is yet no- 
thing by actuality. I understood at last its 
inexhaustible capacity to be all things to all 
men while being forever unable to be every- 
thing to any man who is not either a local 
counter-jumper or a wastrel at large. 



Nursemaids and Children at io6th Street 



VII 



^■^ 










VII 

I ONCE saw an Italian peasant woman, fresh 
landed from the steerage and dressed 
in all the fete-day regalia of her native pro- 
vince, chase a Broadway car for half a block 
in front of the Post-Office, and, catching up 
with it from behind when it stopped at Park 
Place, and failing to notice the en trance way 
for such cases made and provided, grasp the 
brake-handle of the rear platform, throw a 
sturdy, red-stockinged leg over the rail, and 
swing herself aboard with the satisfied air of 
having successfully surmounted the first diffi- 
culty of a new country. 

Broadway smiled, collected her fare, and 
went on about its business. It does not, as a 
rule, impress one as having much time for 
foolishness. 

107 



BROADWAY 
We often hear it stated that it is the longest, 
and the busiest, and the most spectacular, and 
the most spendthrift, and the most modern 
thoroughfare in the world. Sometimes the au- 
thors of these statements jump out at us like 
highwaymen, crying, "Your admiration or 
your life ! "and pointing the declaration at us like 
a blunderbuss. Sometimes, like professional 
beggars, they ply us with persuasive details, 
hoping that we will drop an exclamation of 
wonder in their hats. They never tell us — 
perhaps they never noticed — that Broadway 
the spectacular and ultra-modern, the busy 
tender of a hundred irons in as many fires and 
the inconstant discarder of old loves for new 
affinities, is also in an unobtrusive sort of way 
something of a sentimentalist. Hidden in one 
of its many pockets it always has a crumbling 
four-leaved clover, a dying rose, or a fading 

108 



BROADWAY 
ribbon that it shows occasionally to those who 
were its cronies during the progress of that 
particular affair. The fact that it never car- 
ries the same souvenir for long is another mat- 
ter. Let those who think themselves entitled 
to do so, pass judgment on that. 

Does any one know just when it was that 
the old woman who used to sell white rabbits 
with pink eyes at Easter-time, water-lilies in 
mid-June, and vari-colored puppies at other 
seasons, disappeared from her post between 
Nineteenth and Twentieth Streets on Broad- 
way? With her has gone most of what sur- 
rounded her, and her going was perhaps the 
cue for those invisible scene-shifters whose 
work, unnoticed in the doing, is to dismantle 
the stage and prepare the new settings for 
the successive acts of Broadway's progressive 
comedy. 

109 



BROADWAY 

For years, just south of the main doorway 
of Lord and Taylor's, she sat on some invis- 
ible support close to the ground. The shawl 
that bound her head and was pinned under her 
chin added its folds to the ample draperies 
of her comfortable skirts, and, blending with 
the brown iron walls behind her and the gray 
stone beneath, half enveloped and half re- 
vealed the clothes-basket or washtub that held 
her wares. From her ruddy face two cheery 
eyes looked out at a now vanished world of 
belles in bustles and gallants in "skin-tight" 
trousers, innocent of creases. There was no 
gasoline in the air she breathed ; and all day 
long smart victorias and landaulettes and shiny 
carriages, with plum-colored liveries on the 
box and horses in jingly harness, drew up 
in front of her. And all that was middle-aged 
and fashionable and haughty, and all that was 

110 



Times Square — Rectors^ Times Building, Hotel Astor 



BROADWAY 
young and gay and debonair, in the life of the 
city of the day, passed her unheeding at close 
range or stopped to laugh into each other's 
answering eyes while pretending to pet a 
puppy. 

Does anybody know just when she disap- 
peared ? 

Three blocks to her left the Fifth Avenue 
Hotel marked the boundary beyond which, 
unless it was to scuttle round the corner to a 
matinee at Palmer's Madison Square Theatre, 
no self-respecting female ever ventured to be 
seen. Park and Tilford's was near by; and 
Arnaud's, which had ministered to genera- 
tions that knew not Huyler. Morrison's stood 
at her right hand. Qorham's glittered a few 
feet away. The sign of Cypher — cryptic 
name once fraught with half-mysterious sug- 
gestions of an esoteric cult for the antique — 

113 



BROADWAY 
glowed up at her from the eastern corner of 
Seventeenth Street. Across from this, Jacques 
and Marcus decked their windows hke the 
Queen of Sheba; while beyond Whiting's, 
Tiffany's hid its glories behind a dignified 
reserve and kept the southern gateway of 
its world against the barbarians of Fourteenth 
Street. 

Does anybody know just when she disap- 
peared ? 

Already there are thousands who pass the 
empty red-brick building at the Nineteenth- 
Street corner who do not know but that Gor- 
ham's was born and brought up at Thirty- 
sixth Street and Fifth Avenue. Already there 
are thousands to whom the names of Isaacs 
and of Simon on Tiffany's old iron building 
carries no hint of irony. Already deft putters- 
together of two and two, who happen to visit 

114 



In front of Hotel Jstor 




0m'k^ 











BROADWAY 

the adjacent stretches of Fifth Avenue be- 
tween twelve and one o'clock at noon, when 
they discover that what they had taken to be 
an international convention of labor-unions 
just adjourned or a mass meeting of the alien 
unemployed waiting to be called to order is 
nothing but a few of the clothing- factory and 
sweat-shop workers of the region taking the 
air and a cigarette after lunch, may think that 
they can read the fortune of near-by Broad- 
way in the ten thousand bowler hats, the ten 
thousand wagging tongues, and the twenty 
thousand gesticulating hands of that assem- 
blage. 

And for the most part, even to the rest of 
us, the pathetic plight of this once palpitating 
stretch of highway, now plainly moribund, 
though still breathing the last gasps of its fash- 
ionable incarnation, is a negligible incident, 

117 



BROADWAY 
even if noticed. For one of the many things 
that we Americans have as yet found no time 
to practice is the luxurious indulgence of re- 
grets. We let the dead past bury its dead, if 
it be so minded ; or, more likely still, leave the 
ceremony to foreigners. And Broadway is 
the most insouciant of us all. 

But sometimes, especially on wintry after- 
noons when hurrying faces are muffled in 
furs and the lights in the shop windows make 
brave play on such satins and jewels as are 
left, some of us feel a tug at our heartstrings 
in walking from Union Square to the Flatiron. 
And then, if we are quick to understand its 
sign language, we know that Broadway is tell- 
ing us that it still remembers. And we realize 
that whatever new keepsake it may be cher- 
ishing the next time we share its confidence, 
for the present the blocks between Seven- 

118 



BROADWAY 

teenth Street and Twenty-second are the 
sprig of rosemary that it is carrying — for re- 
membrance. 



up Broadway from lljth Street 



VIII 










VIII 

THE Japanese have an engaging legend 
about a company of blind men, who, 
happening for the first time upon an elephant, 
enthusiastically undertook to investigate the 
nature of the beast. One of them threw his 
arms about a hind leg. One of them got hold 
of its trunk. One of them, by standing on tip- 
toe, managed to grasp its tail. One borrowed 
a ladder and so got a grip on an odd ear. Sub- 
sequently they came to blows over discrepant 
conclusions. 

Similarly, there are some field-naturalists 
who are thoroughly convinced that Broadway 
is a creature of exclusively nocturnal habits. 
Their observations, indefatigably prosecuted 
but ultra-specialized, have led them to believe 

123 



BROADWAY 
that it lies up during the clay, stirs and stretches 
itself languidly in the gloaming, and only 
rouses to full activity after dark. If, along 
about dusk, you find leisure to stand for a 
while on the little stone island of safety that 
lies between the headland of the Worth Mon- 
ument and the promontory of the F'latiron 
and provides a port of refuge for timid navi- 
gators in those troubled waters, you will easily 
come to understand, perhaps for a time even 
to share, this erroneous but widely credited 
theory. 

All afternoon the traffic of Twenty-third 
Street has fretted for the whistle or poured 
itself across Fifth Avenue ; the quadruple line 
of motor vehicles on the latter thoroughfare 
has alternately stopped and started at the busy 
crossing; and the poor Broadway cars, almost 
unnoticed, have been content to make their 

124 



BROADWAY 
way diagonally between, as occasion offered. 
Now there is a gradual dying-down of this 
confusion. Twenty-third Street is shutting up 
shop. Fifth Avenue is lighting its double row 
of close-set lights and going home to dinner. 
The Flatiron is becoming shadowy. At last 
the Metropolitan Tower, that for half an hour 
has been getting more and more like a great 
white ghost, calmly hangs its clock, full-moon- 
wise, in the east and lights its peaceful planet 
in the zenith. The show seems to be over for 
the day. 

But as you, too, turn to leave, you notice in 
the north four hanging ropes of lights — so 
like the ropes of stars that parachute rockets 
let down when they burst, that you almost see 
them wave in the wind. And as you look, the 
lights become letters, and the letters form 
themselves into words, and the words are 

125 



BROADWAY 
HOFFMAN and VICTORIA and CAFE MAR- 
TIN and BRESLIN. And below these fire- 
works and beyond them, you see a glare as 
of a conflagration, and hear a murmur like a 
County Fair. And then, ''By George! " you 
say to yourself, *'I believe the naturalists are 
right." And you follow the crowd. 

Unhappily (can one draw out leviathan 
with a hook?) one cannot put that glowing 
spectacle into words, or paint the electric 
fairyland where, high above the happy crowd, 
huge white kittens wave exultant tails while 
tangling endless miles of crimson silk, and all 
the Kings and Queens of Table Waters hold 
their courts by sparkling fountains, and gigan- 
tic boxers deal each other phantom blows, and 
ghostly winds blow blazing skirts across the 
sky. One can only walk and look and tell 
one's self that after all Broadway begins at 

126 



Broadivay at Columbus Circle 



BROADWAY 
Twenty-third Street and ends at Longenecker 
Square, and sleeps by day and comes to life 
at sundown ; and that when, in daylight, we 
had thought it restlessly alive, all its grunts 
and twitchings were but dreams, and only 
proved that like a dog before the fire it was 
chasing rabbits in its sleep. 

And yet it is not so many years ago that 
little knots of people used to gather nightly 
in newly christened Herald Square to watch 
the glowing eyes in the heads of the Herald 
owls wink solemnly at each minute as it crept 
by ; and if you stopped and listened, you could 
hear little sighs of satisfaction go up from the 
watchers at each repetition of the miracle. In 
those days Broadway, while something of a 
somnambulist, was not considered a noc- 
turnal animal. To-night, as you pass that 
way, you will see that even the fiery, hurtling 

129 



BROADWAY 
horses of Ben Hur's chariot can only win 
passingly uplifted glances from the crowded 
sidewalks. 

Whence comes this transformation ? Has 
the leopard changed its spots ? Is it true, as 
some would have it, that history is repeating 
itself with variations, and that the spirit of 
Imperial Rome has transmigrated into the 
American body politic ? Or is it only that the 
dynamo has been perfected ? Or that Psy- 
chology has turned advertising agent ? 

Believe me, it is something infinitely sim- 
pler and more natural. Have you ever ex- 
tended your natural history studies to the 
firefly? If not, you probably regard it as a 
kind of entomological fluffy-ruffles that sleeps 
the clock around in order to go joy-riding by 
acetylene lanterns in the evening. As a mat- 
ter of fact, it is a little, long, narrow, shabby, 

130 



BROADWAY 
and somewhat awkward beetle, very busy 
about its everyday concerns by daylight. In 
its larval stage it shows faint glimmerings of 
phosphorescence on its body. Later, when 
the first promptings of passion stir its little 
veins, it flies, when its daily tasks are done, to 
hang its lamp of love above the meadow. 

Broadway, too, is long, and narrow, and 
sometimes shabby, and always very busy in 
the daytime. In its larval stage it used to burn 
a little kerosene of evenings. 

Lately it has come into its own. 



The '-^Peanut Man^' 1 1 6th Street 



IX 




YHf- rsAni^T r\f\t\ I "• ir. 



IX 

LUKE BUSHEE was (and, if it please the 
Great Spirit, still is) a Chippewa Indian 
with a few drops of coureurs de hois blood in 
his copper veins, who lived near the shores 
of Lake Nepigon and drove the dryest of 
birch-bark canoes through the whitest water 
of that celestial wilderness. Luke's idea of a 
metropolis was a little village on the Cana- 
dian Pacific Railway which consisted of the 
railroad station, the agent's bungalow^ a 
Hudson's Bay Company Post, a few shanties, 
and a place of occasional, and chiefly liquid, 
refreshment known as a hotel. Yet no cos- 
mopolite, proud of his savoir vivre, whom I 
ever met and talked with, has shown a more 
instinctive knowledge of the formula for 
dining well on Broadway. 

135 



BROADWAY 

It was on my first trip with Luke and we 
had been out some days. During the last of 
these there had been unmistakable signs in 
the air that the ice of aboriginal reserve was 
by the way of breaking up. And finally, 
under the influence of evening and a roaring 
fire, the last barriers gave way and Luke 
asked a question. 

"You live in New York.?" 

" Yes, Luke." 

"You know Ba'tis' Michell.?" 

"No, I don't think I ever heard of him." 

Silence for several minutes. Then, with 
the subtle rising inflection of incredulity, — 

"You live in New York?" 

" Yes, Luke." 

" You not know Ba'tis' Michell ? " 

" No, Luke ; I never heard of him." 

"Huh ! — tha's funny." 
136 



BROADWAY 

And then, with the quiet satisfaction of 
one who convicts you out of your own 
mouth of arguing yourself unknown, — 

"He's the cook at the hotel." 

Now when, in 1659, Martin Cregier built 
his tavern behind the fort, not to have known 
the cook at the hotel would indeed have 
argued one an obscure and inconsiderable 
citizen. Luke's point of view can at least 
make us realize the human reality of New 
Amsterdam. But even though we laugh at 
the twentieth-century absurdity of it, it is 
not, perhaps, so far-fetched as it appears. 
There are still circles within which not to 
know the cook at the hotel is to confess 
one's self a gastronomic philistine and a so- 
cial outcast. 

Snobbery? Not for a moment. Simple self- 
defense. How else shall most of us bear to 

137 



BROADWAY 

see our brothers enjoying the deHghts that 
we have forfeited the abihty to enjoy except 
by calhng them names? Did not Father 
Adam, when he had been expelled from 
Eden and saw the animals still innocently 
disporting there, think for the first time to 
call them " brutes " ? If you have inadver- 
tently eaten of the tree of the knowledge of 
good and evil, only a pull will give you a 
good dinner on Broadway. You can dine 
there, yeomanly, for the price of a Bock — 
if you know where and have a nodding ac- 
quaintance with the man behind the lunch- 
counter. Or you can dine there, royally, for 
the price of a silk doublet — if you know 
where and send your card to your fellow 
sovereign behind the arras. See to it that it 
bears the arms of the United States and has 
a yellow back, 

138 



The Subway Station near the Ansonia^ J 2d Street 






f-'. if %'_ » --^--■- ;;ji- f.-j' 




t. !St 



Vi 



r • f 



■^T^f 




BROADWAY 

Otherwise — well, otherwise you must have 
kept your curiosity unsated by the world, and 
have preserved the native innocence which 
believes that to pay is to receive, that fine 
ceilings make tender birds, and that, epicu- 
reanly speaking, the French can do no wrong, 
if you would not wander on Broadway at 
dinner-time like a Peri barred from Paradise. 

Ah, yes, my dear sir, I can see what you 
are thinking by the quizzical angle of those 
little wrinkles at the corner of your eyes. 

'* Kissing and deviled kidneys," you would 
tell me, *' go by favor the world over." 

*<It is not necessary," you are saying to 
yourself, "to walk me past the Imperial and 
the Saint-Denis, Louis Martin's and the 
Knickerbocker, Rector's and the Hotel As- 
tor, the Empire and the Marie Antoinette, 
the Ansonia and Breton Hall, in order to 

141 



BROADWAY 

point out to me the tricks of trade that Broad- 
way has borrowed from the world at large 
and performs more gorgeously than some, 
if more brazenly than most." 

I know it perfectly, my dear fellow. And 
it is not for that that I ask you to glance in 
at all those happy faces, — something like 
three miles of them, — glowing with the joy 
of dreams come true, that evening and open 
windows display between Twenty-third Street 
and the upper Eighties. It is in order that, 
while they are still fresh in your recollection, 
I may whisper in your ear the truth about 
Broadway. 

There used to be an old Frenchman who 
kept an unacknowledged restaurant in a lost 
corner of that part of Westchester County 
that is now the Borough of the Bronx; and 
a good many years ago two young men who 

142 



The Ansonia^ Broadway and J 2d Street 

/ 



4 



/■' 









.fe. 




■% 




.-.H- 



BROADWAY 

had heard rumors of his Old- World manners 
and Gascon cooking, and who were at the 
age that seeks feverishly for adventures and 
fails to recognize them when found, devoted 
a college holiday to seeking him out. 

At first, somewhat to their annoyance, he 
demurred at the idea of admitting them ; ex- 
plaining that he did not keep a place of pub- 
lic entertainment, but merely, on occasion, 
exercised his skill for the benefit of his ac- 
quaintances. In the end, however, possibly 
touched by the naive disappointment and em- 
barrassed silence of his visitors, he relented ; 
and having ushered them into a sort of vine- 
grown arbor back of his house, he discussed 
most graciously with them the toothsome 
details of their meal. And he ended by say- 
ing, "And now. Messieurs, what will you 
have to drink.?" 

145 



BROADWAY 

As a matter of fact, they had not thought 
to drink at all. But they tried, with I fear a 
rather transparent show of offhandedness, to 
conceal this fact by saying that they would 
have — they thought — some — claret; and 
ended (after a carefully disguised consulta- 
tion on the subject of finances) by ordering 
a bottle of a vintage that the old man com- 
mended in words as glowing as itself, and 
that cost (he somehow made the statement 
do duty at once as an apology and a diagno- 
sis) six dollars the quart. 

Ah ! what a wine that was ! One at least 
of those seekers after the unknown has since 
sampled many vintages in many lands; but 
never, since that old white-haired gentleman 
of France presented that dusty bottle, and 
wiped its lip with a sacrificial napkin, has 
authentic nectar passed his lips ! 

146 



Jn Oriental Bit — First Baptist Church at ygth Street 



iff 
?! 

^ f. f 



H 



"r 




1.^- 








BROADWAY 

Well, the meal was eaten and the wine 
was drunk and the attentive host, with a 
*'L'addition, Messieurs? Bien, Messieurs," 
placed a slip of paper on the table before the 
feasters. One of them read it, looked puzzled, 
flushed crimson, and passed it to his friend. 
He read it, looked puzzled, flushed crimson, 
and passed it back. It read as follows: — 

Two lunches @ $1.00 $2.00 
One Bd. Claret .75 



$2.75 



I 'm not certain, but I believe that expla- 
nations were demanded by youthful dignity, 
offended and up in arms; explanations that 
the kindly smile in those keen old eyes 
should have rendered needless. I know at 
any rate that it was years before the recol- 
lection of that denouement ceased to have a 

149 



BROADWAY 
sting and became, as it deserved, a happy 
and revealing memory. But that was long 
ago. Since then I have many times, in spirit, 
made reparation and apology. And when, 
as sometimes happens, I dine at the latest 
gold-and-crystal Valhalla on Broadway 
(where perhaps Ba'tis' Michell — not yet, 
alas, one of my acquaintances — may be the 
cook), I think of that old Frenchman as I 
look about me at the feasters and I know 
that Broadway is not a robber of the guile- 
less and a passer-off of spurious wares upon 
the unwary. It is smilingly giving to its 
children glimpses of their hearts' desires. 
Only it is wiser in its. generation than the old 
Frenchman. It does not give its trick away. 
It charges them for what they think they get. 



The 135th Street End of the *■'■ Dip^" starting at 120th Street 



X 








#*■ 



X 

IN the heart of a mountain forest ( from a 
convenient crotch in a big pine tree) I 
once saw a huge grizzly saunter majestically 
along a dim path in the dusk. 

I was a good twenty feet from the ground 
and the wind blew my scent too high over 
his head for my nearness to alarm him by 
apprising his alert nostrils of my presence. 
At the same time my elevation enabled me 
to see, approaching along the converging line 
of a well-marked trail, a younger bear of a 
decidedly cocky cast of countenance and evi- 
dently out for an evening's pleasure. 

They met at the junction and the younger 
animal, evidently thinking that he had the 
right of way, attempted — with a friendly air 

153 



BROADWAY 

that seemed to say, '*Why, hello, grandpa ! " 
— to share the going with the intruder. But 
the latter, while never for a moment abating 
his dignity, and never, so far as I could see, 
breaking his even and deliberate stride, raised 
a lightning-quick forepaw, gave a short, rau- 
cous growl, and went on his even way — alone. 
If you follow up Broadway from where it 
starts a garden at Columbus Circle ; past its 
noisy crossing of Columbus Avenue at Sixty- 
sixth Street ; past the little subway kiosk and 
the towering hotel turrets at Seventy-second 
Street ; past where it finally abandons its fad 
for the automobile business at Eighty-sixth 
Street ; up a hill to Ninety-second Street and 
down to the " bench " below, you will come 
to where the little village of Bloomingdale 
once stood and to where, at One Hundred 
Third Street, the Bloomingdale Road, hav- 

154 



At lOph Street 




r,i<f'h 



BROADWAY 
ing fulfilled its mission, came to peaceful 
end. 

The resting-place of both is marked by 
little epitaphs on the near-by lamp-posts 
which read " Bloomingdale Square." 

Here, too, from the south, young West 
End Avenue runs in, lined with perky resi- 
dences and innocently bent upon its youthful 
business. But you will search for it in vain 
toward the north. Bloomingdale Square is 
where cocky little West End Avenue met 
Grandpa Bear. 

There are a few blocks in the One Hundred 
Thirties and Forties where it looks as though 
Broadway had once paused to dream a bour- 
geois dream. It had, perhaps, a momentary 
notion of giving over its gay bachelor exist- 
ence and becoming, in an unobtrusive way, a 
householder; of marrying and settling down. 

157 



BROADWAY 

It built itself some rows of six-story brown- 
stone flats, opened drug stores at convenient 
corners, induced greengrocers and delicates- 
sen gentlemen to come and minister to its 
needs, and prepared to cultivate domesticity 
and raise a family. 

But it soon tired of the experiment. Pos- 
sibly it was only the indulgence of a passing 
weariness. Possibly, as the art critics say of 
similar technical divagations on the part of 
their heroes, it simply '* fell, for a time, under 
the influence of Amsterdam Avenue." 

At any rate, this half-mile of home-spun 
lies along its hilltop, a peaceful point of vantage 
from which to look back upon the splendid 
burst of energy that carried the great high- 
way from Cathedral Heights and the clus- 
tered domes of Columbia University, down, 
down, down, to the river level of Manhattan 

158 



The Park on Broadway at io6th Street 













<^lj 



BROADWAY 
Street, and up, up, up, the slope beyond. It 
offers, too, a convenient criterion of contrast 
by which to judge the joy of recovered free- 
dom with which Broadway goes galumphing 
downhill and up again toward the open ; shak- 
ing itself as it goes and tossing up huge piles 
of big apartments for the pure love of using 
surplus energy. 

They say it ends at Albany. 

But let us no longer suffer from the pur- 
blindness of ancestral habit. Broadway occa- 
sionally lies low, like Brer' Rabbit. But it 
never ends. Albany .? Why, I myself know a 
place in Minnesota where it crops out for a 
mile or so. And I once landed for a few hours 
on the beach of an Alaskan fiord where two 
weeks before, so I was assured by the oldest 
inhabitant of the city that I found there, 
nothing but untrodden tundra and desolation 

161 



BROADWAY 

was to be seen. At the moment, however, 
there were a frame gambhng resort, a hotel 
like a gospel tent, and over two thousand in- 
habitants living under canvas and dreaming 
golden dreams. The hotel stood on a corner 
and displayed a sign that read 

ALL DRINKS ONE DOLLAR 

In front of it stood a lamp-post with a half- 
burned candle in its lantern. And under the 
lantern two box-slats had been nailed cross- 
wise. And on one was painted 

TWENTY-THIRD STREET 

and on the other was painted 

BROADWAY 

Alban}^ ? Nonsense ! The last time I saw 
it Broadway was headed for the Pole. 



A Castle between Broadway and the Hudson — ^^jd Street 



XI 



f1 r !> ' 






^^-^f].^ 



XI 

THERE is a widespread notion that in the 
matter of a man's age there is no going 
back of his birth-certificate. But no observ- 
ant person who has ever been made to feel 
his own ignorant immaturity by looking into 
the wise, patient, disillusioned eyes of some 
babies, or who has had his own premature 
senility brought home to him by the child- 
like joy and trustfulness in some octogena- 
rian faces, really takes any great stock in 
this popular superstition. 

Indeed, that very public, which insists 
upon holding other people to their birth-cer- 
tificates, is individually given to declaring on 
occasion that *'a man is as old as he feels." 
Some poetic philosopher puts it that ** age is 

165 



BROADWAY 
measured by our lost ideals and not by the 
flight of time." And even the physiologist, 
translating the proletarian's horse sense and 
the poet's rhapsody into his own language, 
declares that " a man is as old as his arte- 
ries." 

It is the same with communities. I call to 
mind a village of some two hundred inhabi- 
tants — a very baby of a village, judged by 
the date on its certificate of incorporation — 
that was born and baptized some sixty years 
ago when its home State was a young mother 
proud of many such children. Great things 
were prophesied for it when it should grow 
up and become a city. Its streets were laid 
out one hundred feet wide. Hills guarded 
and beautified it. A stream circled it and 
ran its mills. It had a red-brick school, pretty 
houses bowered in pines, a smithy, a Ma- 

166 



A Suggestion of Spain from logth Street 



? I 







BROADWAY 

sonic Hall, a stage-line, two stores, and a 
future. 

But when the railroads arrived, they passed 
it by on either side; and when the Civil 
War came, it called all its men to the front 
and sent most of them back with pensions. 
And now, for forty years, these grizzling 
veterans have foregathered daily at that one 
of the two stores that happened to be the 
Post-Office, while their wives milked the cows 
and hoed the gardens. And the hundred- 
foot- wide arteries of the trade that was to be 
have hardened until the building of a chicken 
coop calls for (and receives) the presence 
and encouragement of every red corpuscle 
in the community. 

By rights that village ought to be teeth- 
ing. As a matter of biological fact, it is ossi- 
fied with old age. 

169 



BROADWAY 

It is therefore evident that the age of New 
York is not only a determining factor in its 
character, but is not necessarily a matter of 
chronology. The parish register gives its 
birthday as May 26, 1626. Any competent 
physician who notes the unimpaired elasticity 
of its femoral artery, the unhesitating ease 
with which the half-worn cells of its retain- 
ing walls are replaced, and new tissues sup- 
plied at need, will certify that it is under 
thirty. Let us see if we cannot get a line of 
our own on this interesting question. 

A few years ago, in excavating for the 
foundations of the Bowling Green Offices, 
which occupy the lots numbered from five 
to eleven Broadway, the workmen uncov- 
ered what experts and antiquarians declared 
to be a part of the wooden palisade that had 
protected the rear of the Dutch fort of New 

170 



Doctor Mulvey's Dog and Cat Hospital — J Relic^ 
at Cathedral Parkway 



-:^--r 











■*^- *<■ 



-J- /): ^%-^^ ! 

v^?-_../ .^..<^::5:•• 



BROADWAY 
Amsterdam. Experts have, before now, been 
known to err in diagnosis and even antiqua- 
rians are human; so that doubtless the most 
prudent thing to do in the matter of this ex- 
humed fence is, metaphorically speaking, to 
sit on it. But its alleged discovery has a 
bearing, not at all archaeological, on the age 
of Broadway. 

The fact of the discovery was rather widely 
noted by the press. Yet to the average New 
Yorker, who saw it mentioned in his morn- 
ing paper, and to whom a reported discov- 
ery of Roman relics in the sub-soil of the 
Strand, or of the body of another Pharaoh in 
the sands of Egypt would have seemed but 
a commonplace of historical continuity, this 
reported survival of a few posts and palings 
from the nearby time of Dutch highboys and 
Jacobean furniture either looked like a bare- 

173 



BROADWAY 

faced attempt to materialize a legend — like 
claiming, let us say, to discover in the Roman 
Forum the bones of the wolf that suckled 
Romulus, — or else appeared to relate itself 
to the timeless eras of geology. 

In short, it was like showing a bit of his 
own baby-clothes to a youth of twenty-one ; 
to whom his great grandmother's sampler 
appears a mildly interesting and perfectly 
normal family possession, but to whom a 
three-inch red-leather shoe in connection with 
himself is either incredible or antediluvian. 

All of us who have gotten over being 
twenty-one, and have preserved any recol- 
lection of what the experience was like, re- 
member that it was a time when the Future, 
about which we had been openly curious and 
secretly a trifle afraid, became suddenly neg- 
ligible on account of our new-found and com- 

174 



Looking across the Hudson from Broadway at Ii6th Street 






W- 




t^lP^^^^I' TfJ 



BROADWAY 
plete self-confidence in regard to it. Also that 
it was a time when our childhood (an indis- 
cretion that we had never quite lived down) 
all at once receded into an unplumbable 
abysm of antiquity. Also that it was a time 
when, finding that the blundering old fogey- 
ism of our elders had somehow clarified into 
wisdom in Our own noddles, we were glori- 
ously enabled to forge along, deep wrapped 
in the supreme interest of to-day, letting yes- 
terday go hang and to-morrow look out for 
itself. It was a time when we expected, pres- 
ently, to reform the world, and, meanwhile, 
took our own shortcomings lightly. It was a 
time when we looked disdainfully upon the 
amenities of life, yet carried our heads high 
and parted our hair carefully in the middle. 
It was a time when we did crude things 
boastfully and fine things without thought. 

177 



BROADWAY 

How shall we understand Broadway (or 
the city that it bisects or the nation that it 
epitomizes) if we do not, remembering these 
things, see that for all its three hundred years 
of history it is just turned twenty-one? 

They tell us that the world is old and that 
Great Pan is dead. Do not you believe them. 
The world is still fecund. And Pan is not 
dead ; he has merely moved to town. It is 
true that out in the country, these days, there 
is no one left but a few dryads and an occa- 
sional satyr. But if, along Broadway, you 
will watch warily among the crowds, some 
day you will see a footprint that you do not 
know^ Look at it as a Mussulman looks upon 
the sandal of Mahomet. It is as near as you 
will ever come to seeing Pan-America, the 
lustiest of the younger gods. 



Columbia College from Broadway 



Off to Albany 



XII 






n 



i./t;'- 



a" 







M 



XII 

EVEN on the clearest night in summer, if 
you stand on the corner of Broadway 
and Forty-second Street it is impossible to 
see the stars. 

May it not be salutary for us to remember, 
at times, that Broadway itself is probably in- 
visible to, say, the keenest observers on the 
satellites of Sirius ? 

Mr. Chesterton, who is fond of exploding 
bits of unexpected truths so that they sound 
like hyperbolic blank cartridges, has said 
somewhere that in all the relations of life, the 
only thing that really matters is a man's atti- 
tude toward the cosmos. 

A pale-faced man, stretched on a cot in one 
183 



BROADWAY 

of the city hospitals, to whom the chaplain of 
the ward had just been speaking, once said 
to me, "You can say what you like, but 
heaven is a long way from Broadway." 

On the other hand, a certain citizen of 
Gotham died and was buried. 

And, at first, when he came confusedly 
to himself, his senses were obfuscated with 
the notion that he must, once again, have been 
making a night of it. 

But when the eyes of his spirit began to 
clear, he saw that he was in a strange country: 
And as he looked about him his gaze fell upon 
an open doorway. And within he saw a Being, 
surrounded by strange instruments, gazing 
into what might have been a microscope. 

And he said to the Being, " What are you 
doing? " 

And the Being answered, "I am seeking." 
184 



J Relic of Old Broadway near igzd Street 



4 




-^t: 



- wJtoBOn 



*if 



BROADWAY 

And he said," For what ?" 

And the Being answered, " God knows." 

And when the newcomer had thought on 
this for a moment he said, " Why, then, do 
you seek ? " 

And the Being answered, *« There is no- 
thing else to do." 

At that the stranger made bold to enter 
the doorway and to ask, less hesitatingly, 
" What are you looking at ? " 

And the Being answered, " At a drop of 
juice from the body of a bug." 

And he asked, "Is it a rare bug?" 

And the Being answered, "Its numbers 
are a pest." 

And he asked, " Where did you get it?" 

And the Being answered, " From the stalk 
of a weed in my kitchen-garden." And he 
added, "Come and look." 

187 



BROADWAY 

And when the stranger had looked into 
the lens, he saw the sun and the stars and 
all the uncounted orbs of heaven, very small 
and scarcely to be made out, moving in a 
crystal liquor. And, bewildered, he asked, 
"What is it?" 

And the Being answered, " The leuco- 
cytes in the blood of the bug." 

And the newcomer, when he had looked 
again into the lens, raised his head and said, 
in an awe-stricken voice, "Are you, then, — 
GOD?" 

And the Being laughed outright and said, 
"I am but a poor Being like the rest of my 
race, who knows not whence he came, or 
whither he is going, or if God lives." 

And when he had pondered this, he that 
had been a citizen of Gotham said to himself, 
" If these things be so; if the earth and her 

188 



The '•^Frankfurter Man 



BROADWAY 

sister-planets, the sun, the dog star and their 
myriad brothers of the Milky Way, are but 
corpuscles in the blood of an unconsidered in- 
sect from a neglected corner of the kitchen- 
garden of a Being who himself knows nei- 
ther wlience he came nor whither he is bound 
nor if God lives, is it not possible that some- 
times, on Broadway, we took ourselves too 
seriously?" 



THE END 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



gc/ 26 i^w 



ii'^.t 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 
«»CT 28 1911 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 220 485 A ^ 




